John Allen, on an answer to the Pentecostals in Honduras:

Had someone called central casting in a Hollywood studio and asked for a Catholic look-alike of the magnetic Pentecostal preachers today marching across Latin America, they could not have done much better than Oscar Osorio.

Osorio, an articulate Honduran layman with a wife and four children, is a leader in the Catholic Charismatic movement in Central America. He’s also a star of Channel 48, the Catholic television network in Honduras, where his compelling Bible-based preaching opens each morning’s programming.

In a Catholic culture without much tradition of lay activism, Osorio is a rare bird – a full-time lay preacher with a wide regional following.

Part of Osorio’s appeal is that he unabashedly speaks the same deeply personal, spiritual language which has driven the phenomenal growth of Pentecostal Christianity across the globe. According to a recent Pew Trust study, Pentecostalism exploded from six percent to 25 percent of the global Christian population during the 20th century.

Osorio laughs that a growing number of Pentecostals attend his retreats, some telling him afterwards: “Great preaching, brother … it’s hard to believe you’re Catholic!”

Many Catholics here hope the church will embrace the future to which they believe Osorio points during the upcoming fifth general conference of CELAM, the bishops’ conference of Latin America, in Brazil in May. It’s based on aggressive grassroots evangelization, learning in some ways from what’s worked for the Pentecostals, and led by passionate Catholic laity.

“Our current pastoral model is exhausted,” said Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, in a March 20 interview with NCR in Tegucigalpa. Like Osorio, Rodriguez favors a program of missionary outreach led by lay people, and rooted in Scripture.

“We lost our people by the Word, and we have to recover them by the Word,” he said.

Osorio, 52, seems made to order for that mission.

snip

To be clear, Osorio does not simply mimic the Pentecostal “pitch.” His message is unambiguously rooted in Catholic tradition – the sacraments, devotions, the office of the papacy, and a robust Catholic ecclesiology. Yet it’s delivered with the fire and the wit of the most animated “tent revival” preacher.

Osorio quickly built a following in Honduras. He helped to form “Schools of Evangelization” in Tegucigalpa, and before long he was teaching at the archdiocesan seminary.

By now, Osorio said, he has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people throughout Central and South America. His daily television audience reaches some four million Honduran homes, though it’s impossible to know how many are actually watching at any given time. He also feels the time has come for him to put his life story in the form of a book.